Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Fordham Sponsorship 2010-11 Year in Review

Since their inception in 1997, charter schools have been at the center of
some of the most politically contentious debates about education in Ohio. The
past year offered yet another example of charter school controversy, but this
time with a twist. The 2010 elections were very good for Buckeye State Republicans,
with John Kasich winning the governor’s race (replacing Ted Strickland who had
been a charter
adversary throughout his four-year term). Republicans also took control of
the House while expanding their majority in the Senate.

Almost immediately GOP lawmakers set out to make the Buckeye State more
inviting to charter schools. Governor Kasich’s budget proposals in House Bill
(HB) 153 offered a solid plan for not only increasing the number of
charters in Ohio but improving their quality. Crucial elements included
encouraging successful operators to clone good schools; leaning hard on
authorizers to fix or close failing schools and banning the replication of
failure; placing schools’ ostensibly independent governing boards in clear
charge of any outside organizations that they engaged to run their education
programs; creating professional and ethical norms for all parties; insisting on
transparency around academics, governance, and finances; channeling fair
funding into successful schools; and introducing best practices and expert
advice into every step of the process. This was a vision that excited us and
many others in Ohio and beyond because it sought to boost quality, not just
quantity.

It seemed at the time that finally the Buckeye State was positioning itself
to become a leader in both charter school quality and expansion. Then the House
version of the budget came out in April and with it an enormous risk that yet
again the charter school community in Ohio would shoot itself in the foot. The
House’s budget would have done away with any meaningful accountability for
school operators just when it seemed like we were moving in the right direction.
It would have, among many other items:

Neutered both governing boards and authorizers
of their oversight responsibilities and authority and given charter school
operators carte blanche authority over virtually all school decisions; and

Exempted charter schools from compliance with
most of the state’s education laws and rules, essentially transforming them
into publicly funded private schools.

We were not the only ones upset by the House’s charter school proposals. The
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the National Association of
Charter School Authorizers wrote in a joint letter to Senate leadership, “We
are writing today to express our serious concerns with HB 153 as passed by the
House. In the guise of helping charter schools, we believe that HB 153 will
actually harm charter schools.” The letter continued, “Many of the provisions
in HB 153 contradict the charter school model, thwart efforts to strengthen
charter school accountability and quality, and will ultimately undermine popular
support for Ohio’s community schools. As passed by the Ohio House, the charter
provisions of HB 153 represent a significant risk for Ohio’s community school
sector.”

The president and CEO of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools
warned that the House’s budget, “takes the public out of public education,”
while the Columbus Dispatcheditorialized
that “School choice is meaningless without good charter schools from which to
choose, and that requires accountability and effective oversight.” The Senate
agreed with the critics and ultimately purged most of the troubling language
from the bill, but yet again there had been much political drama and uncertainty
around charters and their future in the Buckeye State. This time, however, the
danger came not from charter foes but from friends of school choice who had
sought to neutralize authorizers, including Fordham, and governing boards in
the name of efficiency for well-heeled school operators.

But, fortunately, the larger charter school community rallied itself
around the need for charter school quality and at the end of the day Ohio’s
charter school law came out of the budget process stronger on some fronts while
weaker on a few others. Improvements included requiring all charter schools and
charter school authorizers to be rated by their performance index (PI) scores.
Under the changes to law, the authorizers with the lowest 20 percent of students
accordingly to the PI cannot open new schools until they improve or close the
ones they have. Further, the budget allows schools to open in districts rated
in the bottom five percent of all school districts.

Unfortunately, the law also requires the Ohio Department of Education to
yet again sponsor charter schools – it was fired from the role in 2003 by the
General Assembly after a blistering report
from the Attorney General at the time chronicling the many failings of the
department as a sponsor. There is no evidence that the department or the state
board wants the job authorizing schools and they now find themselves dealing
with some potential troubling conflicts of interest. The most bizarre is that
the department is now responsible for not only overseeing and rating all 80
plus sponsors across the state (and it has struggled to do this job well), but
is also now also responsible for authorizing schools of its own. In practice,
this means the department’s Office of Community Schools must now hold the
department’s Office of School Sponsorship accountable for the performance of
its schools and take corrective action against itself as needed. This will likely
be a painful situation for the department as it will surely create divided
loyalties and confused responsibilities within the department. Better would be
to have the department out of sponsorship all together, while giving it the
resources and legislative mandate to hold all authorizers accountable for the
performance of their schools.

FORDHAM'S CHARTER SCHOOL PORTFOLIO: IMPROVING SCHOOLS BUT NOT FAST ENOUGH

Despite the uncertainty around the state budget and the future of charter
school authorizers in Ohio, Fordham’s sponsored schools made gains in 2010-11. With
the exception of one school, Fordham-sponsored schools made academic gains last
year. Three Fordham-sponsored schools were rated “Effective” (a “B”), two
“Continuous Improvement” (a “C”), and one “Academic Watch” (a “D”).

The next
three exhibits use data from the Ohio Department of Education provide detail on
how the Fordham schools as a whole stack up against those of the other major authorizers
in the Buckeye State. Graph 1 below shows that, while we don’t currently have
any schools in Academic Emergency, 11 percent of the students in our portfolio
were in a school rated Academic Watch (Springfield Academy of Excellence).
Fifty-two percent attended schools rated Continuous Improvement, and 37 percent
attended schools rated Effective.

Graph 1: Fordham-sponsored Schools v. Portfolios
of Other Sponsors, by State Rating

Graph 2
shows how Fordham’s portfolio fared against other authorizers regarding “value
added.” Of the 10 largest Ohio authorizers studied (by number of students),
fully 57 percent of students in Fordham schools made “above expected” growth in
2010-11. Note, when a school makes above expected gains it automatically gets
an academic rating jump of one level (from Academic Watch to Continuous
Improvement for example). However, 38 percent of students in Fordham-sponsored
schools did not meet expected growth in 2010-11.

In the Big 8 cities,
approximately 80 percent of schools (district and charter) were able to help
their students meet or exceed expected value-added gains. This, however, does
not translate into a solid “Performance Index” (PI) score, an indicator that
takes into account whether students actually reach proficiency, not just
whether they’re making gains. More specifically, PI scores reflect averages of
a school’s student achievement in all tested subjects in grades three through
eight, with the most weight given to students who exceed state standards. The
PI runs on a scale from 0 to 120, with a state target of 100 for all schools.
Graph 3 tells the PI story at a glance. It shows that fully eight in ten
schools (district and charter) in the Buckeye State’s biggest cities met or
exceeded academic growth, but less than five percent (25 out of 510) earned a
PI score of 100 or higher.

Ohio’s urban
schools have done a decent job meeting or exceeding value-added growth, but few
receive a PI score above 100 because many students in these schools are still
not reaching state proficiency expectations. Unfortunately, Fordham sponsored
schools are a microcosm of this trend.

CONCLUSION

Since we first
started as an authorizer in July 2005, our sponsorship portfolio has evolved
considerably. Six years ago we started with a total of 10 schools (all in the
Dayton-Cincinnati area) that collectively served about 2,700 students, and all
but three of these schools we inherited from the Ohio Department of Education
as they were booted from sponsorship in 2003. For the most part, our initial
crop of schools were troubled academically with five being rated Academic
Emergency, one being rated Continuous Improvement, and one being rated
Excellent (three new start-up schools were unrated). Over the last six years
we’ve had six schools leave our portfolio either through closure or by jumping
to other sponsors; we’ve opened one new school only to see it close after a
year; and we’ve birthed two new schools. We currently sponsor only four of the
ten schools that originally signed with Fordham in 2005.

This year,
Fordham-sponsored schools serve approximately 2,500 children and as the data show
these schools have made progress. This is a reflection of the hard work and
dedication of the educators, school board members, and students in each
building. But, more work remains to be done. We know it and we won’t hide from
the challenge, but more importantly the teachers, school leaders, and board
members working in the schools we sponsor are committed to making a difference
in the lives of children who need it and they are making progress.